The head of the Human Rights Coalition said in a statement that Harold Ford Jr. “reversed” himself when he announced he supports same-sex marriages, but that “is certainly welome news.”

“However,” said Joe Solmonese, president of the group, “it is also going to take more than an overnight conversion for our community to forget and forgive the two votes, one as recently as 2006, the Congressman made in support of George Bush’s Federal Marriage Amendment – an amendment that would have enshrined discrimination into the US Constitution.”